A tenor who’s found his groove

Updated 10:50 am, Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Get into a conversation with Lawrence Brownlee, and you could easily think you were chatting with some amiable stranger in a bar or coffee shop. He’s gregarious and personable, and he has a variety of yarns to tell about his family, his upbringing and his fanatical devotion to the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Then he rattles off a quick snippet of a Rossini aria — the tone sweet and pure, the diction nimble, the phrasing offhandedly elegant — and it all comes back: You’re talking to one of the most gifted bel canto tenors of our day.

At 44, Brownlee has tended to operate a bit in the shadow of some of his better-known peers, including Juan Diego Flórez and Rolando Villazón. But a series of polished and expressive recital discs — including a fine recital of Bellini and Donizetti arias just out on Delos — and a number of acclaimed debuts in major international houses have raised his profile.

Now Brownlee is making a long-awaited San Francisco Opera debut, opening Wednesday, Sept. 28, in Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale.” It’s the music best suited to the lightness and agility of his voice — a fact that emerged early in his training.

“When I started out, I wanted to sing tragic stuff where people die. I wanted to sing ‘Nessun dorma.’ I had the high notes, but I didn’t understand about the capacity of a voice.”

Brownlee was winning vocal competitions practically right out of the gate. But at one of those events, a local voice teacher — he says he doesn’t know who it was, but he’d like to find her and thank her — took him aside and told him, “You’re an extremely talented young man, but what you sang today is not right for your voice.”

The search for the right repertoire came to an end soon afterward, when a teacher assigned him an aria from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.”

“I was not excited about it all. This wasn’t I had hoped for. But the more I looked around at the repertoire — not just the bel canto composers but Mozart and even Bach — the more I thought, ‘OK, there’s a lot there for me to sing.’”

There’s even more repertoire for him today than he might have imagined as a young beginner. Brownlee played a small role in the 2005 world premiere of Lorin Maazel’s opera “1984,” and last year created the title role in “Yardbird,” a biographical opera about Charlie Parker commissioned from composer Daniel Schnyder by Opera Philadelphia.

“Parker was such an iconic figure, and so important to American music — not just jazz. It was a tremendous honor for me to bring his life to the forefront.

“When people think of him, the first two things they think of are ‘heroin addict’ and ‘virtuoso.’ We wanted to talk about more than just addiction.”

The score, written expressly for Brownlee’s talents, is a hybrid of opera and jazz, and he says the experience broadened his appreciation of vocal style.

“Working through the score made me understand the way jazz musicians use all the extremes — the high, the low, the fast, the slow. As opera singers, we tend to sing within a nice little compact range. But doing that role taught me how to maximize my voice.”

Brownlee grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, part of a large family in which music always played a central role. His father was the choir director in their church, and the family sang both in church and home.

His earliest musical activities were mostly instrumental, playing drums, guitar and trumpet. He was cowed, he says, by the vocal prowess of his three older sisters.

But his occasional church vocal solo and participation in the music programs of the Youngstown public school system kept garnering applause, and soon he began to take to the limelight himself. Giving up his plans to become a lawyer (“I could always talk my way out of sticky situations, so that seemed like an obvious career”), he started to focus seriously on musical training.

Today, Brownlee lives in Atlanta with his wife of eight years and their two children, 6-year-old Caleb and 5-year-old Zoe. Caleb is on the autism spectrum, and Brownlee is active with the organization Autism Speaks.

His wife, Kendra, formerly a banker, has taken over the financial management of his career, which he refers to as “Lawrence Brownlee Tenor, Inc.”

“In this business, each of us is a self-contained entity. We don’t get health insurance, we just get a check at every performance. So there’s a lot of tax work and accounting and budgeting, which she has learned to do.

“I think this is a class every young singer who wants to get into the business should be taught.”

For now, Brownlee is working on his current assignments and looking ahead at other, somewhat heavier repertoire he might try taking on.

“I’m looking at ‘William Tell’ — heavier voices have done it, but I think I could do it too. Then there’s Bizet’s ‘Pearl Fishers,’ and maybe down the road ‘Lucia di Lammermoor,’ because that’s an opera I really want to sing.”

Amid all of this, Brownlee also makes time for a range of hobbies that include tennis, fantasy football and his chief offstage passion, salsa dancing. During his San Francisco sojourn, he’s been making regular visits to El Valenciano in the Mission District.

“Salsa dancing has been a great vehicle for me to meet people wherever I am. When I go to London, for example, I have friends who are not singers, and they can show me the city in ways that are unconnected with Covent Garden.”

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